For any of you who read up on or practice SEO techniques, you know this: the past year and an half has been rough. Google has been releasing major algorithm update after update — each having momentous changes to search engine results. Many businesses have lost their rankings overnight.

Google’s intentions, of course, are good — but the actual results have been horrible. What has resulted is almost an chaotic penalizing of sites. Countless completely whitehat sites have been penalized. The casualties of war, I guess — and Google has admitted to this. Furthermore, Google has also admitted to the existence of Negative SEO, which I find appalling.

The net result is SEO has become an unreliable way to promote your website. I have, unfortunately, learned this first hand.

A more reliable method is Social Media Marketing. For my web startup, the majority of my online marketing methods focus on social media channels.

The premise behind Social Media Marketing is to remain top of mind.

When you log into your Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn account, you are bombarded with a live, constantly changing feed of updates. Therefore, to capture your social audience’s attention, you need to constantly provide relevant, engaging updates.

This is difficult. It requires a lot of time and effort.

To address this, I am actually working on launching a new service for webmasters. This service will put your Social Media Marketing (as well as a good part of your Internet Marketing) on AUTOPILOT. The techniques used will be completely whitehat. The premise of my service is to automate a lot of what you ought to be doing manually to promote a successful online business.

More on this as the service gets more fleshed out and closer to launch.